


I’m Not Sorry It’s Over

by DoubleL27



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Bittersweet, Break Up, Broken Engagement, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22192876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleL27/pseuds/DoubleL27
Summary: This isn’t quite where he expected to be at 6:37 PM on a Tuesday, in their carefully decorated bedroom, frozen in place, tie hanging around his neck, undone. There was a routine to their lives together, a bit of a dance. Usually by this time he’d be stripped from his work clothes, changed into sweats and headed into the kitchen to make dinner. Instead he was staring at his fiancé falling apart in front of him and he didn’t quite know what to do."I just…” Rachel’s voice catches on a sob, her mascara running down her face “God, Patrick, I'm so sorry."
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/Rachel
Comments: 26
Kudos: 78





	I’m Not Sorry It’s Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [houdini74](https://archiveofourown.org/users/houdini74/gifts).



> The title comes from “Your Ex Lover is Dead” by Stars. 
> 
> For @houdini.74 who threw out: Someone (not it) needs to write a fic where Rachel cheats on Patrick and all he feels is relief.
> 
> Thank you to @RhetoricalQuestions for the amazing beta and pushing this fic to be the best it could. Thanks to [@this_is_not_nothing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/this_is_not_nothing/pseuds/this_is_not_nothing)for the help finalizing the title when I wanted it to be longer.

This isn’t quite where he expected to be at 6:37 PM on a Tuesday, in their carefully decorated bedroom, frozen in place, tie hanging around his neck, undone. There was a routine to their lives together, a bit of a dance. Usually by this time he’d be stripped from his work clothes, changed into sweats and headed into the kitchen to make dinner. Instead he was staring at his fiancé falling apart in front of him and he didn’t quite know what to do. 

"I just…” Rachel’s voice catches on a sob, her mascara running down her face “God, Patrick, I'm so sorry."

Patrick sits on the end of their bed staring at her, his elbows piled on top of his knees. The feeling that spreads through is as unfamiliar as anything he had ever felt, bubbling up and filling him, warm and comforting. The feeling, he realizes after a moment, is relief. It is not the confusion and the frustration and the guilt-soaked grief of not being able to make the numbers add up the way his head say they should. He wants to laugh, but Rachel stands in front of him, crying and devastated and Patrick knows it would be cruel.

Instead, he pulls out the calm facade he’s utilized all these years and looks into her warm brown eyes. “So, let's talk about this.”

“You’re not mad?” Her hand runs through her red hair for the fifth time since they began, making it even more bedraggled than the usual sleek style she started with every day. “Patrick, you should be furious! I...what I did.”

Patrick’s not sure he’s ready to talk about that. What Rachel did wasn’t even the point. The point remains the loose thread in the fabric of their relationship, that they kept trying to snip off, without looking for the source. Finding the source of that thread would surely be their unraveling. 

Patrick chooses to be brave — except in all the instances he was a goddamn coward— and this time he gets right to the point. There’s nothing left to yell or scream anymore, just a quiet, “Rachel, do you actually want to marry me?” 

Her face travels through a litany of emotions as his words sink in and Rachel’s face settles into the stubborn, set jaw he’s known since they were kids.

“Patrick, we’re engaged.”

He knows that line. It’s familiar and practiced, and he has used it before. _We’re engaged_ like it’s obvious that it means something. In the end though, it’s just another way to keep from answering a question that you don’t want to know the answer to. How many times has he said them to Rachel, to himself, these pat _non_ -answers that swerve around boulders in the road you don’t want to see? Probably more than Rachel ever has. 

“Yeah, but we don’t have to be.”

_We don’t have to be._

The little voice in his head that has been smothered inside a locked box is now free of its confines and is dancing around. They don’t have to be engaged. They don’t have to be married. He can love Rachel. She can be his best friend. They don’t have to do this.

Her fingers twist together and apart. “I know what I did is unforgivable.”

“Rachel, I don’t want to talk about what you did right now. I want to talk about us. Do you actually want to marry me? Do you want to live the rest of our lives out like this?”

She’s on her knees in front of him, her hands coming to grasp his and Patrick does her the courtesy of returning her squeeze. “I love you. You’re my best friend.”

She knows all of his lines and is saying them back to him. They’re hers, too. Fifteen years and countless breakups later, they’ve used those words to justify every misstep, every backslide. “I know,” he tells her, because he does know. His voice is kinder than anyone would say she deserves when he gently reminds,”That’s not what I asked.”

“Patrick.”

“Happy people in functioning relationships don’t cheat, Rachel,” he tells them both, looking down at their joined hands. 

“Patrick!” This time his name is a furious wail, as if he stabbed her, and she releases his hands to scramble back to upright.

“I’m not saying—“ Patrick bites back on the urge to yell or argue. “You’re not entirely to blame, is my point.”

“But I—“

“I know. I know.” It doesn’t burn like it should, that she was finding enjoyment with someone else. Logically, he should be devastated. He’s not. That it’s Kirk from Rachel’s office, who Patrick has always thought was a dick, is annoying at best. “But, Rach, I think we need to talk about us, for real this time.”

The silence stretches between them, heavier than it has ever been. Patrick watches as Rachel screws her eyes shut tighter, her tiny hands fisting in ways they only do when she’s hit a wall. When she opens her eyes, the warmth is gone and they are the bleak brown of mid-winter mud. 

“Do you want to marry me?” she asks, a bare echo of his earlier question. 

“No.”

Relief washes over him in waves just by uttering this single syllable. He didn’t understand the weight of carrying around these two letters until just this moment. He doesn’t want to marry Rachel; he never has. Patrick wants a marriage like his parents have, the steady partnership, infused with laughter and support, where and the arguments are never the kind that burn everything to the ground. Patrick thought that Rachel was the person that he could have that marriage with, ignoring the growing pit in his stomach, and the way they could shred each other to ribbons with well placed remarks. 

His truth causes a familiar explosion, Rachel’s hands flying overhead. “God, Patrick! Why?”

Instead of tracing the familiar pattern of their fights around the well-worn track, Patrick sighs. “Because I love you too much for this to be the rest of our lives.”

“I didn’t mean—“

The laugh that’s been hovering in his chest at the ridiculousness of the evening, finally bubbles up and Patrick buries his face in his hands. “Rachel, it’s not like you just had sex once! I came home to find you having sex with Kirk, of all people, on a video call. That’s not an accident or a one-time thing.”

When he hadn’t found Rachel in the living room, Patrick figured she would be in the bedroom. His suit jacket was draped over his arm and he wanted to ask her if she wanted to go to the work function he had in two weeks. He opened the door and found her in bed, pencil skirt shoved up around her waist and her fingers pulling aside a pair of panties he had never seen while her dirty heels dug into the comforter. A tinny voice came from her phone which was angled at the end of the bed, talking _dirtier_ to her than he ever had. 

“I don’t even really like him that much. He just makes me feel—“

Rachel snaps her mouth shut, cutting off the flow of words, but Patrick hears every word she didn’t say: _sexy, wanted, needed, satisfied._ He hasn't made her feel that way in years and he knows it. It’s in the way they avoid sex these days, how he never touches her breasts unless explicitly asked, how the images he imagines have become more and more incongruent with person who sleeps beside him every night. 

He cannot even really claim surprise. Rachel updated her work wardrobe recently, with fresh blouses and new pencil skirts that hug her tighter than her old ones. She’s been shaving her legs for the past three weeks, and it’s February. Rachel always used to giggle and say that her favorite thing about having a boyfriend that actually kind of got off on leg hair was that she didn’t have to worry about shaving. Patrick used to tell her that her ginger, almost translucent, body hair was barely-there at best, but she would point it out in spades. His co-worker Jake, had caught her out with Kirk at a bar after work one day and had sent Patrick a text with a photo and _a what the fuck is this?_ message. He’d brushed it off thinking it was just Jake being his usual overly imaginative self, but really, Patrick suspected everything Jake did. 

Rachel comes and sits on the bed, leaving a gulf open between them. “We could try couples counseling?” she offers, following the old script, a token for how to fix all the things they’ve broken. 

Patrick shoots her a look complete with raised eyebrow, and her face crumples inward before she looks back down at the floor like it holds all the answers. They’ve tried this game for too long and Patrick can’t let them continue.

“We’ve brought that idea so many times over the last five years, Rachel and we have never once tried it. And I think we both know why.”

“So, I’m going to ask you again, Rachel, is marrying me what you really want? One where you need to go looking elsewhere for the things you should feel with me?”

He doesn’t talk about what a relief it is to know she’s just as unhappy with the lack of feeling between them as he had been. For years now, every time Rachel waxed poetic about their relationship, he worried that the fundamental flaw in their relationship was him. A part of Patrick— a secret part that wished her legs were hairier and thicker, that dreamed of being the partner whose head got tucked neatly under someone’s chin, who wanted to run his hands over a strong chest and feel it rise and fall under his palms. Still, he knew _he_ was a larger part of the problem than Rachel and her needs. 

“No.”

He’s not alone in this. Patrick lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding at the realization that ultimately, they want the same things. “Okay then.”

“Okay then?” The hysteria edges back into her voice, and Patrick knows he has to move over the cracked ice of their relationship carefully. “Patrick, we have a wedding planned. We are going to have to cancel everything. We’re going to have to _tell_ people.”

There’s the crux of it. Despite the number of times they’ve bounced in and out of this relationship, they’ve always given off the air that the base was solid, that they were meant to be, and have always worked to project that image to anyone who could see them. They are a beautiful lie that they’ve mostly been telling themselves and now— now, they have to face the truth. 

He never wanted to face it either, far too content to maintain the lie. So, he takes her hand, crossing the divide and offers what little comfort he can. 

“I know. But we haven’t even booked that much, Rachel, and we can control how we tell people.”

“Like a conscious uncoupling,” her laugh is bitter as the words that come out. But it dies as quickly as it started and Rachel sounds so much younger than her almost thirty years when she says, “I don’t want to lose you.”

She said the same thing to him at seventeen, and then countless times after that, and perhaps the old refrain is stuck in his brain in just that tone. 

“Rachel, I don’t want to wake up one day and hate you. That’s the road we are on, to wake up in our forties, angry and resentful that we weren’t honest earlier. And you’re not losing me.”

Rachel looks at him like he’s the biggest idiot she’s ever seen. Patrick’s not sure he could disagree with her. “We’re breaking our engagement.”

“I know but this isn’t like all the other times. I’m not storming out of here angry and refusing to speak to you and neither are you.” Patrick looks at her and waits until her eyes meet his before he says clearly, “I love you. You’re my best friend. Those are still true, but none of it means we have to stay together.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” Patrick tells her, with all the guilt he’s been carrying for years threading into his voice. 

Rachel’s free hand rushes to assure him, covering the back of his hand that is holding her other one so that her tiny hands span his own. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I think we both know that’s not true.” Patrick knows he hasn’t been the man she needed. He let her waste years with him because he was too scared to really look at himself. He owes her more than he can ever repay. “Takes two people to make or break a relationship, Rach.”

It’s easy to lean over and kiss her forehead, but then that always was easy. “I’m going to make dinner and I think I’m going to sleep in the guest room from here on out.”

“Okay.”

Patrick lets go of her hand and stands up to hang his tie carefully on the rack in their closet and begins the steps necessary to move on with the rest of their lives. 

* * *

The digital clock reads 2:00 in bright red numerals when the door hinges he always forgets to oil creak open. Patrick turns and spies Rachel, dressed in his gym shorts and t-shirt like a child in adult clothing, standing in the doorway, crying. Because they’ve never been good at keeping solid boundaries between them, he lifts the covers and waits while she scrambles into the bed. She pillows her head on his chest and he doesn’t stop her, smelling the flowery shampoo she hasn’t changed since college. 

“It’s real this time,” she sniffles into his own shirt, a wet spot forming where her head lays. Patrick is uncertain if she’s asking him or telling him, a thread of confusion woven into her voice. 

Patrick strokes at her long flame-red hair in an old, comforting gesture. “Yeah, it is.”’ 

As relieved as he is, it’s still devastating to realize that they failed at the thing Patrick worked the hardest at in his adult life. Rachel burrows in tighter and it reminds him of long nights rehearsing Grease in high school at fifteen, waiting for their next turn on stage. Those months lead to everyone talking about what a cute couple they made and how in love they were, even though until other people pointed those things out she had only been his best friend. How long has he just slipped into other people’s interpretations like a second skin? Like how while everyone called Rachel his girlfriend, he slipped right into doing it too, all the while enjoying Kevin Fowler’s performance of Danny Zuko in leather pants more than he had known he should. 

“Can I sleep in here with you tonight?” Rachel asks, bringing him out of the past and into the present and the weight of things he’s never known how to fix. “I know I don’t have a right to ask you for that, but I just can’t fall asleep in there alone.”

“Yeah.”

“I know it doesn’t change things.”

It doesn’t, but it’s something he can give to her. “It’s okay, Rachel.”

They lie together in bed, their breathing syncing up so that there only seems to be one inhale and one exhale. Patrick thinks about how it’s always weird to go back to sleeping alone without another body in the bed. They’ll have to do it eventually and tonight is just an example of them putting off the inevitable _another day._

Still, Patrick is ready for this new future they were heading off into for the first time in a long time. He’d been dragging his feet helping Rachel with wedding planning— he knows now— trying to delay an event that was supposed to be full of joy and meaning but had only ever given him a sense of impending doom. Patrick’s mind skips over to the flier for a gay club he picked up from a coffee shop last week (and squirreled into the back of his sock drawer), a curiosity he neither wanted to dwell on at the time, nor ever bring himself to throw it away. He’d finally been brave enough to tell Rachel that he didn’t want to marry her. Maybe he was brave enough to do other things he had been hiding from.

Rachel’s breath breaks from their even rhythm with a sigh. “I know you said I should keep the ring, but you should take it back. It was your grandmother’s.”

“Rachel.”

He can hear her pursed lips and the sour expression she has on her face even as he stares at the ceiling. “The next woman you love deserves that ring, Patrick.”

Silence stretches between them until he finds the courage to say, “I don’t know that there’s going to be another woman, Rach.”

She’s off his chest in a flash, whirling in him with her long hair streaming behind her like a fury. “Don’t say that!” she yells, her palms slapping angrily against the covers. “God, Patrick. Even if we’re not together you still deserve love! I can’t be responsible for you not being happy.”

“That’s not—hey. Hey.” Patrick reaches out and pulls Rachel back into his embrace. “That’s not what I meant. Come here.”

“I just want you to be happy.”

“Rach, I want to be happy too, I just…” Patrick’s voice cracks and he pauses with a _mmm_ trying to regain some kind of control. 

“Patrick?”

He closes his eyes as if it will make him invisible. If he can’t see anything it means nothing can see him. Patrick wills himself to be brave. He can’t let Rachel continue to stand alone in the ruins of their life thinking she single handedly burnt it to the ground. “I mean that I don’t know if I’ll be happy with any woman. Maybe— I think— I, I might be happier with a—a man.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?” Rachel asks, voice brittle after what feels like a lifetime of silence. 

“I, I’ve never—never really let myself, _consciously,_ think about it—so—I don’t know,” Patrick tells her, knowing that honesty is the only thing he has left for her. It’s true, every time thoughts came up he would push them away, place them in a box to never be opened again. Except they kept coming back no matter how much he tried. “Not really, but I think it’s always been there in the background. I just think I didn’t want it to be true.”

It’s not as if anyone ever suggested that he might be interested in men that way, and he denied it. Patrick was always assumed straight, and he had never thought to question it. He was always going to find the right girl someday, grow up and have a family. He learned to talk about being an ass man when guys talked about the joys of boobs. 

“I wanted to make us work, Rachel,” he tells her, and that’s the truth that’s lived in his heart since he was fifteen and he decided if everyone else thought that this was what love was they must be right. “I’m sorry.”

The ceiling of their guest bedroom is an expanse of white with a light fixture that mostly resembles a boob and he’s never liked it. Patrick stares at the boob light though as he tries to keep the tears in his eyes from spilling. 

“Patrick, you know it’s okay if you’re gay, right?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Have you ever—“ Rachel trails off, scared of the answer.

“No. You’re the first person I’ve ever said anything to.”

“That’s something.”

“I want you to be happy too, Rachel. I wanted to be the one to make you happy.” He thinks of the practiced dance they’ve been dancing for the last fifteen years, the different ways he has turned himself inside-out for them. “I tried.” 

But he’s not the person who will make her happy. Patrick has failed at that job more times than he likes to remember. 

“I think that maybe it's time we took it upon ourselves to find our own happiness.”

The simplicity of her statement pulls a log out of Patrick’s chest. He shakes his head and rubs a hand over her back. “You’ve always been smarter than me, Rach.”

“We know that’s not true, Brewer,” she says and the smile he can’t see curls into his chest. 

Patrick presses a soft kiss to the top of her head, to comfort them both. “Hey, just promise me that you’ll end up with a guy better than Kirk, will you. My best friend deserves better.”

“Maybe if you keep telling her, she’ll believe you.”


End file.
